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Research open datasets on 2019 European Parliamentary Elections

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Daniel Gomes and Diego Alves at presenting at CLEOPATRA final event

Last updated on November 3rd, 2023 at 12:29 pm

Arquivo.pt preserved online documents in several languages about the 2019 European Parliamentary Elections

The 2019 European Parliamentary Elections were an event of international relevance. The strategy to preserve the relevant information on the World Wide Web is delegated to national institutions. However, the preservation of web pages that document transnational events is not officially assigned. 

The Arquivo.pt team, with the aim of preserving the cross-lingual online content that documents this event, applied a combination of human and automatic selection processes.

The process of generating the collection about the 2019 European Parliamentary Elections was performed in two steps.

In the first step, 40 relevant terms in Portuguese about the 2019 European Parliamentary Elections were identified, and then, automatically translated into the 24 official languages of the European Union: Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish and Swedish. 

These translations were reviewed in collaboration with the Publications Office of the European Union. Besides that, in parallel, a collaborative list was launched to gather contributions of relevant seeds from the international community.

In the second step, the Arquivo.pt team iteratively ran 6 crawls (99 million web files, 4.8 TB) using different configurations and crawling software, to maximize the quality of the collected content. 

The obtained web-data was aggregated into one special collection identified as EAWP23 and became searchable and accessible through Arquivo.pt in July 2020 (https://arquivo.pt/ee2019).

CLEOPATRA project: Cross-lingual Event-centric Open Analytics Research Academy

Daniel Gomes and Diego Alves at presenting at CLEOPATRA final event
Daniel Gomes and Diego Alves at presenting at CLEOPATRA final event

The CLEOPATRA ITN was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network aimed to generate ways to better understand the massive digital coverage of major events in Europe over the past decades. 

The main goal was to facilitate advanced cross-lingual processing of textual and visual information related to key contemporary events at large scale and develop innovative methods for efficient access and interaction with multilingual information.

In total, 14 Early-Stage Researchers hosted across 9 European Universities developed their research while enrolled as Ph.D. students. 

Associated partners such as Arquivo.pt contributed to CLEOPATRA by hosting and training early-stage researchers such as Diego Alves. As part of the training program, he conducted a secondment at Arquivo.pt in Lisbon from June to August 2022. 

The idea was to develop part of his research about syntactic structures of EU languages using the textual resources preserved by the Arquivo.pt and exchange knowledge with the web-archiving experts on the strategies to extract and process historical web-data. 

Diego Alves defended his Ph.D thesis entitled Computational typological analysis of syntactic structures in European languages in July 2023 at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Zagreb (Croatia). 

Generating textual datasets for Natural Language Processing

Diego Alves’ work originated cross-lingual datasets about the 2019 European Parliamentary Elections precious for research.

This work will be detailed in chapter “Robustness of Corpus-based Typological Strategies for Dependency Parsing” of the open-access CLEOPATRA book entitled “Event Analytics across Languages and Communities”.

A 3-step Natural Language Processing pipeline was developed to generate research textual datasets that can be used in several types of digital humanities studies:

  1. Extract text: The textual content was extracted from each web-archived URL using the newspaper3k Python library. The language of each extracted text was determined using the langdetect library, to separate the texts written in different languages across distinct files;
  2. Clean extracted texts: a Python script was applied to clean the texts by removing unnecessary information (e.g.: repeated instances, empty lines, etc.);
  3. Double-check of language identification: the language of each cleaned extracted text was verified again to eliminate possible errors originated during the previous steps.

Two new research datasets are openly available!

The result was a dataset of cleaned and language-verified texts publicly available. Each file contains the texts in a given language about the 2019 European Union Elections. The distribution of extracted texts for each language is described in the figure below:

Number of tokens of each corpus extracted from the collection 2019 European Union Elections preserved by Arquivo.pt (EAWP23).
Number of tokens of each corpus extracted from the collection 2019 European Union Elections preserved by Arquivo.pt (EAWP23).

The aforementioned corpus was automatically annotated regarding part-of-speech and dependency relations to generate a corpus with syntactic information which is useful for linguistic studies. 

The multilingual model of the UDify tool (Kondratyuk and Straka, 2019) was applied. 

The texts in these annotated corpora followed the same order of the respective raw-texts files. Each sentence is annotated following the Universal Dependencies framework in the CoNNL-U format, which is the reference in terms of syntactic annotation in Natural Language Processing. Thus, each file in this dataset contains the annotated texts in a given language about the 2019 European Union Elections

The syntactically annotated texts about the 2019 European Elections are publicly available!

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Arquivo.pt presentations at IIPC GA/WAC and RESAW 2023

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Last updated on August 1st, 2023 at 12:42 pm

Meeting with the Web Archive Community

The International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC), a consortium that brings together Web preservation initiatives from around the world, held its General Assembly with its members on May 10, 2023.

On the following days, May 11 and 12, the IIPC Web Archiving Conference (IIPC WAC) was held, an initiative open to the community, where people or entities not associated with the IIPC and interested in the Web preservation domain can participate.

The two events were jointly hosted by KB – National Library of the Netherlands, and by Beeld & Geluid – Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision.

Contributions from the Arquivo.pt at the Web Archiving Conference

Arquivo.pt participated in the IIPC working group meetings (Training Working Group and Curators Working Group) and contributed with presentations in the thematic sessions Collaborations & Outreach and Program infrastructure (sessions 7 and 17).

  • Arquivo.pt updates 2023 (slides)
  • Linking web archiving with arts and humanities: the collaboration between ROSSIO and Arquivo.pt (video, slides)
  • Arquivo.pt behind the curtains (slides)

Meeting with the RESAW research community

RESAW (Research Infrastructure for the Study of Archived Web Materials) is an initiative created in 2012 with the aim of promoting studies based on archived Web content, in areas such as Social Sciences, Digital Arts and Humanities.

The RESAW 2023 conference was held at the MUCEM Lab (Mediterranean Institute of Heritage Crafts) in Marseille on June 5-6, 2023, under the theme Exploring the Archived Web During a Highly Transformative Age.

Contributions from the Arquivo.pt at RESAW 2023

Arquivo.pt contributed with presentations to the sessions Web Archive in Mediterranean area and its merge (4.A), From online Tools to Web Archive (6.B.), Towards a participatory approach to collections (9. A.), Digging up the materials for writing web history (9.B.).

  • How to research governmental web data? (abstract, slides)
  • Archiving Cryptocurrencies (abstract, slides)
  • Time to explore, time to learn from the archived web: Arquivo.pt training initiative (abstract, slides)
  • Exhibiting Web Memories from Arquivo.pt: a call for community participation (abstract, slides)

CLEOPATRA Project Meeting

The CLEOPATRA Project, led by the L3S Research Center at the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz University of Hannover, has developed since 2019 a training programme for doctoral researchers (Early Stage Researcher, PhD).

Arquivo.pt has participated in three courses: Incentives design for hybrid multilingual information processing and analytics, in Southampton; National and transnational media coverage of European parliamentary elections, 2004-2014, London; and NLP for under-resourced languages, in Zagreb, Croatia.

In 2022, the Arquivo.pt welcomed two researchers in its facilities who used the archived resources and received special support from the Arquivo.pt team to develop their research.

The CLEOPATRA Project ended in 2023 with a meeting on the 16th May, in Hannover, which brought together Professors, Researchers and representatives of the institutions involved.

Daniel Gomes, Arquivo.pt’s Manager, highlighted the new tools that Arquivo.pt makes available and the results of the work carried out by the researchers that have passed through Arquivo.pt.

  • Secondments@Arquivo.pt and new research tools available (Slides)

Portuguese municipal elections 2021 preserved by Arquivo.pt

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Last updated on May 8th, 2023 at 05:09 pm

Thousands of pages about the elections to preserve before they disappear

On 26 September 2021 the local elections were held in Portugal, an event marked by the Covid-19 pandemic. The communication of the candidates was mainly based on the media and publications through the Web.

Electoral websites are of manifest historical importance. However, they are difficult to identify because they appear and disappear quickly. In the case of municipal elections, the number of candidates and the variety of channels used makes the task even more challenging.

Arquivo.pt, as in previous elections, launched a special collection to preserve contents concerning the municipal elections.

How was the electoral content published on the Web identified

The first step was the manual identification of election-related content by municipality and parish. For this purpose help was requested from people and organisations with the following initiatives:

  • collaborative list “Municipal Elections 2021: we need your help!“
  • request for collaboration from the archive services of the 308 municipalities in the identification of electoral sites and candidates of the respective municipality;
  • request to the Parties to send the names of their lead candidates.

The Eyedata – Social Data Lab site was used, which made the names of candidates from all over the country available on the Web.  The Wikipedia page Eleições autárquicas portuguesas de 2021 was also used as a source of information.

This manual identification process resulted in a list of 255 addresses which documented the candidacies for the 2021 Municipal Elections. Notice that 61% of the identified addresses pointed to private social media platforms: 54% facebook.com, 5% instagram.com and 2% twitter.com).

Much of this content of national interest could not be preserved because these foreign private companies do not allow it.

The list with names of candidates by county, party or coalition was used to create automatic searches in Bing that identified the most relevant electoral contents.

For instance, by combining the term “autárquicas 2021” with the name of a candidate and the respective municipality, one obtains results related to that candidate, such as news, initiatives of his/her campaign or the official page of his/her electoral campaign.

This methodology was applied in the Presidential Elections 2021 and in the Europeia Elections 2019. The technical report A transnational crawl of the European Parliamentary Elections 2019 details the applied methodology.

Content collection and availability in Arquivo.pt

Between 22nd August and 8th October 2021, the Arquivo.pt gathered, in an exhaustive manner, pages related to the Local Government Elections 2021.

The resulting collection called Municipal Elections 2021″ (EAWP39) gathers 31 million files that total 2.7 TeraBytes of information and will be available one year later.

Researchers who want to make a study on the 2021 Local Elections and need early access to the collected contents can contact Arquivo.pt.

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H2020 projects preserved by Arquivo.pt

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Last updated on June 16th, 2023 at 01:40 pm

The main objective of Arquivo.pt is to preserve online information for research and education purposes.

Previously, Arquivo.pt identified and preserved Research & Development project websites funded by the European Union during the FP4, FP5, FP6 and FP7 programmes (1994-2013).

Now, Arquivo.pt contributed to preserve online information that documents R&D projects funded by the Horizon 2020 programme (2014-2021). It preserved 197 million web files (17 TB) related to science for future access.

H2020 projects publish valuable information online but are being lost

Websites about Research and Development (R&D) projects are increasingly being used to publish and disseminate important scientific information that complements published literature (e.g. data sets, documentation or software).

However, after projects ending, the corresponding websites usually disappear causing a permanent loss of unique and valuable scientific information.

Arquivo.pt automatically identified URLs that document H2020 Research and Development projects

The European Union’s Open Data Portal published a data set from the Community Research and Development Information Service (CORDIS) that documents H2020 research projects. However, from the 31 129 projects listed, only 46% presented a project URL.

Arquivo.pt developed a low-cost methodology that automatically identifies URLs related to R&D projects to be systematically preserved. This automatic identification is achieved through the combination of open data sets with web search services. This methodology is detailed on a scientific article published at the International Conference on Digital Preservation 2016.

In sum, we extracted 106 300 unique URLs from the following open data sets:

Then, we extracted the acronym and title of the projects from the data sets and automatically searched the web for additional URLs using the Bing Search API.

All the data sets and tools developed have been made publicly available in open access so that they can be reused and collaboratively enhanced. In particular, you can access the software developed to automatically identify additional URLs about H2020 projects.

197 million web files related to science were preserved

Arquivo.pt identified and preserved 197 million web files (17 TB) that document R&D projects funded by Horizon 2020.

In 2021, we can already witness project websites that are no longer available online, such as the Extended Model of Organic Semiconductors (EXTMOS) project (http://extmos.eu/). However, it was preserved and can be accessed at Arquivo.pt:

Archived version at Arquivo.pt (https://arquivo.pt/wayback/20170427182603/http://extmos.eu/) of the home page of the EXTMOS Research and Development project (http://extmos.eu/)funded by H2020.
Archived version at Arquivo.pt of the home page of the EXTMOS Research and Development project funded by H2020.

Contributions to complement the European Open Data Sets

All the resulting data sets were made publicly available so that they can be improved and reused by other organizations also interested on preserving this digital heritage:

If you want to know more information about this collection you can watch the video Preservation of web content related to Horizon 2020.

References

Are you a researcher?

Create automatic narratives about any topic!

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Arquivo.pt provides a new function that allows you to automatically create temporal narratives on any topic.

The “Narrative” functionality, integrated into Arquivo.pt in September 2021, is the result of the collaboration between “Conta-me Histórias”, winner of the Arquivo.pt Award 2018, and Arquivo.pt.

The “Conta-me Histórias” (Tell me Stories) project was developed by researchers from the Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Decision Support (LIAAD – INESCTEC )  and affiliated to the institutions Instituto Politécnico de Tomar – Center for Research in Smart Cities (CI2) ; University of Porto and University of Innsbruck .

How it works?

When a user enters a set of words about a topic in the Arquivo.pt search box and clicks on the “Narrative” button, the user is directed to the “Conta-me Histórias” service, which automatically analyzes the news from 25 websites archived by Arquivo.pt over time and presents a chronology of news related to the topic.

For example, if we search for “Just Bieber” and click on the “Narrative” button (Figure 1), we will be directed to the “Conta-me Histórias” , where we will automatically obtain a narrative of archived news (Figure 2).

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Figure 1: Search results for pages about “Justin Bieber”.

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Figure 2: Narrative of news about “Justin Bieber” from Portuguese news sites preserved by Arquivo.pt generated by the “Conta-me Histórias” service.

Create your narrative now!

“Conta-me Histórias” researches, analyzes and aggregates thousands of results to generate each narrative about a topic. It is recommended to choose descriptive words about well-defined themes, personalities or events to obtain good narratives.

Creating a narrative is useful for researchers, journalists or citizens who want to quickly get an overview of the evolution of a topic along time, thus saving them a lot of time and effort.

Go to Arquivo.pt and try to create a narrative about a theme of your choice.

Tell us about your experience so we can improve the service!

Presentations in the IIPC Web Archiving Conference and RESAW 2021

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Thumbnail IIPC WAC 2021

Last updated on November 17th, 2022 at 05:37 pm

During the week of 14 to 18 June, three international meetings were held by videoconference with the participation of the Arquivo.pt:

    • International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) – General Assembly – general assembly of the consortium that gathers the Web archiving initiatives around the world
    • Web Archiving Conference 2021 – the most important meeting in the field of Web preservation, where experts share new knowledge and experiences
    • RESAW Conference – meeting of the European RESAW network (Research Infrastructure for the Study of Archived Web Materials) this year in its 4th edition, mainly addressed to the community of researchers from non-technological scientific areas, such as Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities.

Contributions of Arquivo.pt to the international community

Arquivo.pt presented some results of the work developed in the last year, with emphasis on the functionalities that improve the reproduction of the archived contents, such as the “Complete the page”.
Two historical collections were integrated on the Arquivo.pt: the Geocities and the Internet Memory Foundation. Arquivo.pt did special collections about the 2019 European Elections and Covid-19.
The contents of Arquivo.pt are accessible to any researcher regardless of the country they are in and therefore it is a useful service to the international community.

Presentations

  • Arquivo.pt updates 2021: presentation at the IIPC – General Assembly, by Daniel Gomes (Vídeo)
  • Complete the page. 1 minute drop in (presentation at the IIPC – General Assembly “complete the page”), by Daniel Gomes (Slide, Video)
  • A transnational and cross-lingual crawl of the European Parliamentary Elections 2019, by Ivo Branco (Slides, Vídeo)
  • Enhancing access to research the Geocities historical collection, by Pedro Gomes (Slides, Vídeo)
Complete the page - demo
Complete the page – demo. Slide used in the IIPC 1 minute presentation, at the IIPC General Assembly 2021

New “query suggestions” on Arquivo.pt!

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Arquivo.pt launched a new version, named Caronte, on January 19, 2021.

In this version we improved the query suggestions feature (Did you mean).

Whenever a user enters a query containing a potential error, Arquivo.pt presents a suggestion for an alternative query.

For example, when searching for “now york” you get the suggestion “Did you mean: new york”.

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Figure 1: Example of the query suggest feature by searching the term “now york”

The opening of applications to the Arquivo.pt Award 2021 until the 4th May became also emphasized on the home page.

Help us to improve!

To help us, just search the Arquivo.pt using any device (e.g. laptop, mobile phone, tablet).

If you encounter any problem, please contact us!

Remember to always send us the address of the page where you detected the problem.

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Arquivo.pt preserves websites of national scientific projects

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Last updated on October 1st, 2021 at 09:11 am

Preserving scientific project websites is important

The contents of the websites tend to disappear when the scientific projects are finished.

The preservation of scientific project websites is important because:

  • documents the development of projects;
  • ensures access to unique technical and scientific content that researchers have posted on the project websites (eg presentations, photographs, data sets);
  • reinforces the visibility of the results of projects financed by FCT.

Experimental collection of scientific projects websites in 2016

Arquivo.pt automatically collected websites for projects financed by FCT in 2016.

The information about these websites was dispersed as it was not recorded during the administrative process.

For about 20 years, FCT financed scientific projects, so the number of sites could be too high to be identified manually.

Then an automatic methodology for identifying these websites was developed, developed by Arquivo.pt.

The FCT database had a total of 11,996 project entries but did not include references to web addresses. Applying the automatic methodology, 7 956 URLs related to the funded scientific projects were identified.

The collection of content referenced by these addresses resulted in the preservation of 600 721 files (72 GB), including content such as research group web pages, researchers’ personal pages or project-related blogs.

Online references in scientific project reports have been preserved since 2020

From June 2020, the website addresses of the projects financed by FCT must be registered in the progress and final reports funded by FCT.

Arquivo.pt started using these addresses to preserve the contents of websites of national scientific projects in a systematic way.

1st official collection of scientific project websites

In June 2020, Arquivo.pt obtained 263 addresses related to 100 scientific projects from the reports submitted to FCT. Most of the addresses (67%) did not have any version previously preserved in Arquivo.pt.

The addresses obtained point to online resources such as the websites of the projects, R&D units, news in the media, articles in scientific journals or repositories, databases, videos on Youtube or Facebook pages.

In July 2020, a special collection was launched from this set of addresses which resulted in 6.9 GB of information obtained from the visit to 31,606 URLs.

Exhibition about Research & Development projects

The Scientific Research Memory is an online exhibition dedicated to the websites of scientific projects funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) that Arquivo.pt has preserved.

There are also websites of the Research & Development Units financed by FCT.

Memorial do Arquivo.pt preserves scientific websites for free

The Memorial do Arquivo.pt service has preserved historic FCT websites that have been disabled. These were created for events or initiatives that have ended and therefore their contents are no longer updated.

To include a website in the Memorial, Arquivo.pt starts by making a high quality collection of its contents.

Then, the collected contents are validated in collaboration with those responsible for the website.

Finally, the website address is redirected to the contents that have been preserved by Arquivo.pt.

For example, if someone wants to access any page on the Scientific Archives Meeting held in 2014, they will be redirected to Arquivo.pt.

Thus, the contents remain accessible over time and the links, the references in scientific communications that may exist do not break.

The digital preservation service Memorial do Arquivo.pt is free of charge for websites of the academic and scientific community, just send a request to contacto@arquivo.pt.

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Online archives or archives of the online?

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At the end of 2020, we recommend some texts that put the future in perspective.

We highlight the theme of preserving online content presented in the ebook “Tendências 2021” (Trends 2021). The contribution of Daniel Gomes, the Arquivo.pt manager, was entitled “Arquivos online ou do online?” (Online archives or archives of the online?).

I was invited to write about the challenges and threats to online archives. The first question that came to me was what is meant by an “online archive”?

My concern lies in the “archives of the online” because there is not even an established awareness about their need, whether at an academic, governmental or individual level.

It is technologically impossible to preserve all information available online. But it is absurd not to be aware that we have to preserve some of the information online for short, medium and long term access.

The complete text (in Portuguese) is available at pages 23 to 26 of the open-access book “Tendências 2021”.

The challenge is to cultivate awareness about the importance of preserving content online by learning how to do it in practice.

Happy New Year!

World Digital Preservation Day 2020

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Last updated on November 23rd, 2020 at 06:20 pm

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On November 5, World Digital Preservation Day, Arquivo.pt held an online session open to the community.

Registration form (free but required)

The speaker for this session was the winner of the Arquivo.pt 2020 Award, Miguel Ramalho, who presented his work. “Desarquivo” is a web aplication that searches for entities on Arquivo.pt and return a graph.

As in 2017, 2018 e 2019, we invited everyone to get to know Arquivo.pt, and to use it in research and in the preservation of memory.

World Digital Preservation Day is promoted by the Digital Preservation Coalitium (UK) and an occasion for initiatives around the world, shared on social networks with the WDPD2020 hashtag.

Agenda:

November 5th

3:00 pm – Welcome! Presentation of the Arquivo.pt team (slides, 1 MB, PDF)
3:05 pm – Archive News – Daniel Gomes (slides, 2.6 MB, PDF)
3:15 pm – Desarquivo, 1st place in the Arquivo.pt Awards 2020, by Miguel Ramalho (slides, 3 MB, PDF)
3:45 pm – Questions
4:00 pm – Conclusion

Session video

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